Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#1

Post by adrianbg » Tue, May 01, 2018, 8:09 PM UTC

I've made a Hacker News skill for Alexa so people can get tech news while driving, cooking, or cleaning. The first version lists post titles and summarizes articles:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CKVDXC3

I'll have lots of time over the next few months to refine it and add things like

  - comment summaries
  - selecting posts by topic, and eventually
  - answering questions about articles

What do you think of the skill? What I should add to it? What do people think about voice assistants in general?

To keep in touch, talk to me on Twitter or by email:

https://twitter.com/AdrianBPatter

adrian@patter.io

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#2

Post by adamisntdead » Tue, May 01, 2018, 11:19 PM UTC

Love the idea - what API are you using for summarization?

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#3

Post by adrianbg » Wed, May 02, 2018, 12:01 AM UTC

adamisntdead wrote: post #2

Love the idea - what API are you using for summarization?

Thanks!

Right now I'm using this:

https://rapidapi.com/textanalysis/api/Text%20Summarization

but may switch to a more expensive one and may supplement with manual edits.

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#4

Post by samstave » Wed, May 02, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

adrianbg wrote: post #3

adamisntdead wrote: post #2

Love the idea - what API are you using for summarization?

Thanks! Right now I'm using this: https://rapidapi.com/textanalysis/api/Text%20Summarization but may switch to a more expensive one and may supplement with manual edits.

Where are you located?

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#5

Post by sjwalter » Wed, May 02, 2018, 6:34 PM UTC

This is deadly. Would love if you could feed it custom sources or maybe something like RSS feeds, so I could just "Hey alexa can tell me the top three stories from my feed" or something. No clue if that's possible.

Good stuff!

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#6

Post by adrianbg » Wed, May 02, 2018, 7:38 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #4

adrianbg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Right now I'm using this: https://rapidapi.com/textanalysis/api/Text%20Summarization but may switch to a more expensive one and may supplement with manual edits.

Where are you located?

SF

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#7

Post by adrianbg » Wed, May 02, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

sjwalter wrote: post #5

This is deadly. Would love if you could feed it custom sources or maybe something like RSS feeds, so I could just "Hey alexa can tell me the top three stories from my feed" or something. No clue if that's possible. Good stuff!

Yeah, RSS feeds are definitely on my mind as well.

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#8

Post by NinaJZapala » Wed, May 02, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

I think you are onto to something big! WOW, impressive.

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#9

Post by serg_chernata » Wed, May 02, 2018, 7:51 PM UTC

Can you share any more details about the tech you're using? Libraries, languages, services?

Re: Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles

#10

Post by adrianbg » Wed, May 02, 2018, 7:56 PM UTC

serg_chernata wrote: post #9

Can you share any more details about the tech you're using? Libraries, languages, services?

Alexa does most of the hard stuff: speech recognition / intent detection, and speech synthesis.

My back end is a simple Python service on GCP that handles HTTP requests from Alexa. The same service also downloads the HN front page from the FireBase mirror and gets summaries from this API:

https://rapidapi.com/textanalysis/api/Text%20Summarization

It's not perfect though, so I may switch to a more expensive summarization API, supplement it with manual summaries, and/or train my own summarization model.